The World Energy Council[2] just named Australia’s southern shores the world’s most promising site for the development of wave power[3]. Australia has a goal of reducing their emissions by 60 percent of year 2000 levels by 2050. The World Energy Council noted that if Aussies developed just 10% of the country’s viable wave power sites they could meet their quota. That means that if just 20% of the possible wave power sites in Australia were developed, the whole country could be run entirely by the sea.

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Though the country hasn’t done the due diligence on how much a project of that size would cost financially — we’re guessing it is a pretty steep price tag — the environmental benefits could be huge — as long as the wave power was installed carefully so as not to disturb the surrounding marine life. Mark Hemer, a physical oceanographer from Australia’s CSIRO Wealth for Oceans National research flagship did a study with his colleague, David Griffin, in the AIP’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy[5] to completely flesh out the potential of the Australian waves. Hemmer and Griffen found that Australia’s energy consumption[3] is 130,000 gigawatt-hours/year and that it could be covered with only a small portion of viable wave power areas.

In their study, the team does not push Australia to generate all of their energy[3] from wave power (though we say go for it, if you only need to develop 20% of the viable sites), but they are strong proponents of using this “massive resource” as a way to cover their goals of reducing emissions. “Convert 10 percent of available wave energy from a 1000-km stretch in this area to electricity, ” Hemer noted, and “the quota could be achieved by wave energy alone.” With recent developments and technology in wave energy becoming ever more efficient and powerful — take for example a single Oyster 2[6] wave power generator which can power 12,000 homes — this task might not be so difficult for the Aussies to carry out.